I don’t cry very often. This isn’t a brag or anything, I just don’t. But, as I prepare an article on All Quiet on the Western Front‘s cinematic adaptations, I think about the century that has passed since the Great War ended November 11, 1918, and I made the mistake of remembering and seeking out “In Flanders Fields,” the poem by John McCrae that has been set to music.

Like a lot of my friends, coworkers, and relations, I am – well, it’d be an understatement to say “disappointed with” but melodramatic to say “horrified by” our latest presidential election here in the U.S.A. Yet, on that very same night I became official with the most wonderful girlfriend I’ve ever been with.

My job, here in state government in Illinois, is a daily horror show of political gridlock. Yet, I am more comfortable, more confident, and more easygoing in my job and with my personal finances than I have ever been in a decade of living independently.

Incidentally, I’m also getting published more frequently in Paste Magazine, which has been gracious enough to let me write about movies for the past year, including a major trip to Colombia to talk about the nation’s beleaguered image and, just recently, another about the absurd output (and absurdly low quality) of Steven Seagal’s latter-day… art.

Point is, I’m stressed, jubilant, and/or wistful on a daily basis now. And I find that my time is a bit more divided in ways that are equal parts ponderous and joyous. It’s serendipitous that as I try to get a foot into the door with my own game design, I played Valiant Hearts: The Great War.

I lost it, folks. I haven’t cried at anything – film, play, book, or game – in close to ten years. I shed a few manly tears for this one. It is a celebration of fellowship and devotion in the midst of great chaos. War, the game is saying, is callous and absurd. It treats individual life as disposable. The rest of us would just prefer to live without it, but it comes for us and try as we might, we can’t escape.

I have also been playing Darkest Dungeon, whose similarities basically begin and end at the cartoon styling of the characters and the fact that death is so pervasive and inescapable in it that it becomes almost a dark joke. Valiant Hearts and Darkest Dungeon both know how nutty are their central premises. Valiant Hearts’ premise just so happens to also have actually happened.

I hope to write a bit more about my game design ambitions. I’ve made some programming headway and done some illuminating research on the time period I hope to portray. In the meantime, I’ll leave it to the professionals at Extra Credits to talk a bit about why I found Valiant Hearts so bittersweet.